Hawthorne's habitations
Subtitle: a literary life
By: Robert Milder
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2012
Place of publication: Oxford; New York
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 326
ISBN-13: 9780199917259
Subjects: Mood (Psychology) in literature; Melancholy in literature; Place in literature; Themes, motives; Travel; Criticism and interpretation; Homes and haunts
Description: The first literary/biographical study of Hawthorne's full career in almost forty years, Hawthorne's Habitations presents a self-divided man and writer strongly attracted to reality for its own sake and remarkably adept at rendering it yet fearful of the nothingness he intuited at its heart. Making extensive use of Hawthorne's notebooks and letters as well as nearly all of his important fiction, Robert Milder's superb intellectual biography distinguishes between "two Hawthornes," then maps them onto the physical and cultural locales that were formative for Hawthorne's character and work: Salem, Massachusetts, Hawthorne's ancestral home and ingrained point of reference; Concord, Massachusetts, where he came into contact with Emerson, Thoreau, and Margaret Fuller and absorbed the Adamic spirit of the American Renaissance; England, where he served for five years as consul in Liverpool, incorporating an element of Englishness; and Italy, where he found himself, like Henry James's expatriate Americans, confronted by an older, denser civilization morally and culturally at variance with his own.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Prologue: two Hawthornes; title: Salem I: telling it slant; title: Concord I: the wild and the good; title: Salem/Concord: undoing it all; title: Salem II: Hawthorne and the problem of New England; title: Concord II: sisters act; title: England I: in the belly of the beast; title: England II: indian summer; title: Italy I: a fine bewilderment; title: Italy II: on the crust; title: Epilogue: last words.